How to Enable or Disable the Legacy Boot Menu in Windows 8 / 8.1

The Windows 8 brings a new cool looking Advanced Boot Menu that you can use to access features like fixing the boot problems. But this new menu appears only under certain conditions, for example, in case of a start-up failure or if you are booting up from a repair disk or installation media or if you have a dual boot system etc. The old method of pressing the F8 key to bring up the boot menu no longer works in Windows 8. But you can change the settings in Windows 8 to bring back the older style boot menu that you can access by pressing the F8 key on your keyboard during the Windows boot.

In order to enable the classic F8 boot menu in Windows 8 and 8.1, you can follow these simple steps:

First of all you have to open the elevated command prompt which is very easy to do in Windows 8. All you have to do is press the hotkey Windows + X and select Command Prompt (Admin) from the menu that pops up.

In the elevated command prompt, type the following and press Enter.

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

You would see a message that the operation has completed successfully which means that the classic F8 boot menu is now enabled.

If at any later stage, if you want to disable the legacy boot menu and enable the new style Windows 8 menu, then you can open the elevated command prompt, type the following and press Enter.

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy standard

Again you would see the command success message to indicate that new boot menu is back.